Guerrilla: Killzone 4 only scratches surface of PS4

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The graphically impressive Killzone 4 technical demo only scratched the surface of what the PS4 is capable of, says the lead tech at Guerrilla Games.

In a presentation going into extensive technical detail on the debut trailer for Killzone: Shadow Fall, Michal Valient said the studio aimed to present the video at 1080p running at a constant 30fps, which he felt it had achieved.

He said that the game’s demo only used 3gb of the console’s GDDR5 RAM on video resources, with a further 1.5gb dedicated to system resources. This leaves just under 4gb worth of RAM spare, a factor that likely wasn’t expected during the development of the trailer given the late decision to include 8gb of RAM into the hardware.

Comparing code running in specific jobs from the PS3 to the PS4, he said that the next-gen hardware was much easier to program, as it house one main ‘orchestrator’ thread while allowing all other code to run in jobs across all of the system’s cores.

The polygon count for the in-game characters meanwhile has increased significantly between Killzone 3 and Killzone 4, with Shadowfall boasting around 40k polygons for the highest LOD, while Killzone 3 used 10k polygons.

As well as detailing the technical aspects of Killzone 4 and the trailer, Valient also offered a plethora of optimisation tips for development on the PS4 on areas such as post-processing, and how to take advantage of the GPU and ram.

He explained that multi-threading is a must for developers using jobs on the CPU, while the hardware’s GPU was also “super fast”, although warned devs to watch the number of shader outputs.